Every Saturday is cause for celebration if you’re a Black Library fan, with at least one new release, from brand new novels and audio dramas to new versions of previously published releases. This Saturday, the 3rd of June, is a bumper release day with a brand new Horus Heresy novel as well as a whole host of titles released in new formats…so much so that I thought it might be fun to bring together all of the reviews that I’ve written for the various releases.
I’ve had a copy of Chris Wraight’s Blood of Asaheim on my shelf for a few years now, but until it was revealed as the seventh book in Hachette’s Warhammer 40,000 Legends Collection I had never got around to reading it. Having two copies on the shelf and STILL not reading it just seemed wrong, so I happily rectified the situation – you can find my review here, but suffice to say I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Keep reading…
The best Black Library books are often really cinematic, jam packed with scenes that play out in the mind’s eye of the reader as though they were taking place on the big screen. With that in mind, many a fan has wondered why the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 haven’t been translated into films or TV shows, with the exception of the poorly-received Ultramarines movie. It’s a good question, although the answer is probably something to do with Games Workshop’s (perfectly understandable) desire to keep a tight rein on their intellectual property – if they’re going to do it, they’ll want to make sure it’s done their way. I can see how that might not appeal to film and TV studios keen to make as much money as possible.
The sixth book of Hachette/Black Library’s Warhammer 40,000 Legends Collection is Matthew Farrer’s Crossfire, his first novel for Black Library and the opening book in the Shira Calpurnia trilogy. Similarly to Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn series, this book and the others in its trilogy take a look at life in the Imperium away from the big battlefields, this time exploring what it’s like being a member of the Adeptus Arbites. The 40k universe is a big place, with plenty of conflict on the street level, as Shira finds shortly after landing on a new world right at the beginning of this book.
If you’ve been following the week’s Black Library news you’ll probably have spotted two things. First of all, the Black Library website is now dedicated to just Black Library, with the Warhammer Digital side of things (all the rules, painting guides etc.) now getting its own website – this change comes with a range of offers and discounts on the two websites. Secondly, the first ever (as far as I’m aware) Black Library Humble Bundle is now available, for a limited time only. I thought I’d take a quick look at the various offers currently available, so you don’t have to do the legwork.
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Track of Words has been up and running as a .wordpress.com site for a little over three years now, and in that time I’ve made over 500 posts which have been read many thousands of times. I’m excited to confirm now that there are some changes coming up for the blog, beginning with the migration over to a brand new domain – it’s not live just yet, as I’m finishing off a few little tweaks, but trackofwords.com is coming soon and I wanted to let you all know.
With this post, Track of Words is five hundred blog posts old. Five hundred. Wow.
In the three and a bit years that I’ve been running this blog, it’s grown from a personal project in discipline – a way of making myself stick to a task I’d decided to attempt – into an endeavour that’s far more public and considerably larger in scale. When I wrote and posted my first review (for Rohan Gavin’s Knightley & Son, if you’re interested) I had no idea that a little over three years later I would be writing my four hundred and ninety-ninth subsequent post, or that along the way I would have started interviewing authors, run a competition or be invited to contribute to a podcast.
The weekend of the 4th and 5th of February 2017 saw several hundred Horus Heresy fans descend upon the Nottingham Belfry for the fifth Horus Heresy Weekender, two days (plus a bit of the Friday evening, too) of seminars, gaming and general hobby fun. If you’ve never been to one of these Weekenders, they encompass pretty much everything you can think of regarding the Heresy, with Games Workshop, Forge World and Black Library in attendance, and they give the us fans a great opportunity to spend some quality time with the people who are creating the books, games and miniatures bringing the Heresy to life.
EDIT: Two weeks after posting this, what should turn up on the Black Library website but a brand spanking new boxed set of the first Gaunt’s Ghosts trilogy – The Founding. Called it…
A couple of days ago Black Library announced the latest in a growing line of limited edition hardback boxed sets – this time it was John French’s excellent Ahriman trilogy that got the hardback treatment, in a limited run of 500 copies. True to form (I LOVE this series) I put an order in straight away, and I also posted yesterday with my thoughts on the overall concept of releasing these hardback sets. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it would be interesting to do a bit of (completely wild) speculation on what Black Library might release next in this hardback format.
Yesterday, out of the blue, Black Library released a limited edition boxed set of John French’s Ahriman trilogy. 500 copies only. It wasn’t on the Coming Soon section of the website, it hadn’t been hinted at or teasered…it was a complete surprise. Well. It is, after all, Tzaanuary – according to Games Workshop – so in hindsight it’s not actually surprising that a series of novels featuring Tzeentch’s favourite 40k pawn should get the posh hardback treatment in a month dedicated to the Changer of Ways…